My Name is Joe LaVoie Read online

  MY NAME IS

  JOE LAVOIE

  MY NAME IS

  JOE LAVOIE

  A NOVEL

  W.A. WINTER

  Published 2022 by Seventh Street Books®

  My Name Is Joe LaVoie. Copyright © 2022 by W.A. Winter. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Cover design by Jennifer Do

  Cover design © Start Science Fiction

  This book, though inspired by actual events, is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

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  To Libby, adin

  As he stepped on the drop, he remarked in a low tone, “Such is life.”

  PETER CAREY,

  TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG

  Dead people never stop talking.

  MARLON JAMES,

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS

  THE LAVOIES, CIRCA 1991

  John LaVoie, 1903–1970.

  Marguerite LaVoie, 1906–1955. His wife.

  Eugene LaVoie, 1924–. Their son.

  Yvonne LaVoie, 1924–1924. Eugene’s twin sister.

  John (“Jack”) LaVoie Jr., 1927–1953. Son.

  Bernard LaVoie, 1928–1953. Son.

  Rhonda (“Ronnie”) LaVoie Harrison Adams Grant Gervais, 1931–.Daughter.

  Joseph (“Joe,” “Jojo”) LaVoie, 1932–1991. Son.

  Janine LaVoie Devitt, 1937–1963. Daughter.

  Michael LaVoie, 1942–1965? Son.

  Marie LaVoie, 1942–? Michael’s twin sister.

  EXTENDED FAMILY

  Donald Harrison, 1931–1951. Ronnie’s first husband.

  Annamary Harrison, 1949–1949. Ronnie’s daughter.

  Wade Adams, 1932–? Ronnie’s second husband.

  Michael (“Mickey”) Adams, 1954–1977. Ronnie’s son.

  Roswell (“Rossy”) Grant, 1929–1980. Ronnie’s third husband.

  Bernard (“B.J.”), Elaine, and Joseph Grant. Children of Ronnie and Rossy.

  Armand Gervais, 1920–. Ronnie’s fourth husband.

  Judy Oleski LaVoie, 1926–? Bernard’s ex-wife.

  Robert (“Bobby”) LaVoie, 1952–? Bernard and Judy’s son.

  Edwin (“Eddie”) Devitt, 1935–. Janine’s husband.

  Adriana Cruz LaVoie, 1947–. Michael LaVoie’s wife.

  Richard and Isabel Cruz LaVoie, 1966–. Twin siblings of Adriana and Michael LaVoie.

  OTHERS

  Monika Bauer, 1937–? Joe LaVoie’s German girlfriend.

  George (“Shorty”) Gorman, Jake MacDill, Clarence Coover, Jerome Briscoe. Friends of Joe LaVoie.

  Arnold (“Bunny”) Augustine, 1911–. Northside nightclub owner and crime boss.

  Harold V. Meslow, 1919–1991. Minneapolis police detective.

  Ernest (“Buddy”) Follmer, 1914–. Minneapolis police officer. William Fredriksen, 1926–1953. Minneapolis police officer.

  Thomas O’Leary, 1909–1953. Ottoson County farmer.

  Ferdinand Twyman, 1905–? Hiawatha County prosecutor.

  Clement Bonsell, 1917–? Joe LaVoie’s court-appointed attorney.

  THANKSGIVING, 1991

  ONE

  My name is Joe LaVoie and I’m generally believed to be dead. Probably the only people who know I’m in fact alive are Meslow, the old cop, and what’s left of my family. Everyone else has gone away or died themselves or forgotten, which is all right with me. That’s the way it works anyway, isn’t it? People pay attention as long you’re making noise, as long as you’re in the news, then forget about you when you’re not. Don’t say a word in public for thirty, forty years and everyone assumes you’ve passed on. Well, like I say, whatever you think, that’s okay by me.

  You probably have to be my age or at least the age of my little brother and sister—the twins, presuming they’re still alive, which I don’t—for the name to mean anything to you anyway. In 1953, if you lived in Minneapolis or really anywhere in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin, the name was famous, infamous actually, the most infamous or notorious name there was around here then.

  To us, at least at first, it was only a name, our name, and it was strange to see it printed in the paper and spoken out loud on radio and TV. I remember my brother Jack shouting, “Who the fuck they talking about anyway?” The three of us were listening to the news on the radio of that ’49 Olds, hearing us LaVoies being talked about like the guy was talking about Al Capone or Bunny Augustine. Jack was bug-eyed, he was so mad. He hated people knowing us by our name and then not being factual in what they were saying about us. Bernard pretended he hated it too, but he really didn’t—he was excited to hear his name on the radio, something he had wanted for as long as he could remember, and as long as they got his name right, the other stuff wasn’t important. I still don’t know how I felt about it exactly.

  At any rate, that was a long time ago, and even people who are old enough to remember forget. In Minneapolis alone since then I’ll bet a thousand people have been killed by gunfire. In the past few years, it’s become an everyday occurrence, shop clerks and kids and innocent bystanders getting shot right and left by thugs and each other. There have even been a handful of Minneapolis cops who’ve been killed. I remember Jack saying a couple of days before the end how Fredriksen wasn’t the first cop to get his, and then Bernard chiming in that Fredriksen wouldn’t be the last either, the both of them trying to sound like what we’d done was only a piece of a much larger story, when they both knew that what we’d done was big enough to get us crushed like a trio of June bugs. Still, while our own history was about to end, objectively speaking their words were correct. In 1953, it was still big news to kill somebody in these parts, especially a cop.

  There isn’t a day I don’t think about it myself, when I don’t replay every word and deed I can drag back from that time, and when Meslow is here and on days like today, when my sister Ronnie gathers what’s left of us and we go up to the graves, the thinking and replaying is even stronger. I not only think about the event itself, I think about the name—our name—and what it’s meant and what’s happened to us on account of it. Sometimes I lie awake the night before, instead of sleeping the usual hour or two not sleeping at all, tossing and turning until the sky starts getting pale through the curtain and then saying to hell with it and sitting up and lighting the first cigarette of another day and looking it straight in the face once more.

  You might have forgotten, but I haven’t. You might believe me to be dead, but I’m not—not yet—and neither is my name or my memory, which is where I’ve been living for the past thirty-eight years, if you really want to know.

  Since I was released from prison in 1975, I have lived in three different places, each a little deeper beneath the surface than the one before.

  First of all, after the Cloud, the prison then officially called the Minnesota State Reformatory at St. Cloud, I went back to the house on longfellow Avenue in south Minneapolis, where we all gr
ew up and where we were living, Jack and I anyway, when everything came to a head. My brother Eugene was the only one living there when I got out. Eugene had accepted Jesus Christ as his Personal Savior, was holding a legitimate job, and stayed out of trouble for more than two decades since the last time he was sent up. After the deaths and disappearances of the rest of the clan, all there was in the way of immediate family was Eugene and Ronnie. But Ronnie was having problems with husband number three and drinking more than she could handle, so, for all intents and purposes, all that was left of the LaVoies was Eugene.

  People still knew who I was in 1975, and they would, every once in a while, come by the house on longfellow and throw garbage on the lawn or torch bags of dog shit on the front steps or break a few windows. The telephone number had been changed, but you can’t change or unlist a street address, and when people connected a particular address with a cop-killer, there was nothing you could do to stop them from coming around. Eugene wouldn’t call the cops. Neither would I, but for different reasons. So the two of us would sit with the lights off while green apples the size and feel of golf balls slammed against the stucco walls and sometimes busted a living-room window. Eventually the attackers would stop, bored or out of apples, then scream a few threats and leave. By the sound of their voices I guessed they were too young to have known firsthand what had happened in 1953, but had heard what they knew from their parents or older relatives. For that reason I was never scared so much as infuriated by having to sit there in the dark and take that shit and then stick cardboard in the broken windows so those pissant pricks could have their fun.

  There were other problems too, mostly concerning the neighbors, who said they were afraid for their children, but the worst thing about living there on longfellow was Eugene. I hated him and wanted to kill him and might have done it if I hadn’t left when I did. I would’ve hated Eugene even if I hadn’t been convinced he betrayed us, because we all hated Eugene, had always hated him, even before he found Jesus and became something the rest of us, not even Mother, would ever be. Mother had found Jesus too, but it didn’t seem to change her or make her life any less miserable, so we never considered it a very powerful force. Jesus’s presence was not in and of itself enough to make the rest of us hate Eugene (though it surely contributed) because, like I said, the hatred was there before Jesus was. Granted, there’s some mystery to that hatred, to where it came from. I can take a guess, but that doesn’t make it less mysterious. Call it an example of Original Sin.

  I’d just as soon not get into Eugene any deeper right now, not because it isn’t interesting or because he isn’t part of the history, but because I can only think about Eugene for so long at a time. Besides, what I was trying to focus on were the places I’ve been living.

  So one day, after about six months at the longfellow house with Eugene, I called Ronnie. A man answered whose voice I didn’t recognize, and when Ronnie came to the phone after several minutes, sure enough, she’d been drinking. I didn’t care. I said, “Ronnie, if you don’t get me out of here today, I swear to Christ I’m going to kill him.” Drunk as she was, she knew who I was talking about. She knew I meant it too. It was ten o’clock in the morning. By noon Ronnie and a black guy I’d never seen before had driven into town and loaded me, my chair, and a shopping bag with my stuff into Ronnie’s station wagon and hauled me the hell out of there.

  At that time Ronnie and her kids were living in a falling-down farmhouse west of the city, out in the sticks past Lake Minnetonka. She was still married to Rossy Grant, though Rossy had more or less moved out and Armand Gervais, the black guy in the station wagon, had more or less moved in, and little Joseph Grant, her youngest, was only a toddler. I’d always liked Rossy, who grew up in the old neighborhood, and I felt bad thinking he wasn’t going to be around, but Gervais turned out to be a good guy too, once you got to know him, and he didn’t seem to have the booze problem that Rossy had so maybe he’d be better for Ronnie, whose boozing at the time was almost as bad as Rossy’s. The two older kids, I remember, stood and watched with eyes the size of pie plates when Ronnie wheeled me up to the house that first afternoon. They made me think of the twins, who used to stand around and watch the strange and scary comings and goings back there on longfellow all those years ago, never once saying a word and thinking who knew what.

  Ronnie didn’t want me around at first, I could tell. I was interrupting her and her new playmate just as they were getting to know each other. She resented having to put something over her tiger-striped underwear when she came downstairs and having to make Gervais wait while she helped me in the bathroom and having to wait until after lunch to pick up the bottle she’d quit pouring when she’d finally fallen to sleep at three or four the previous morning. Not that I cared or took any personal offense. I figured it was her house and her body, and nothing she could do at that point would be a shock to my system. I did feel bad for the kids, though—they were too young to watch their mother play around with someone who wasn’t their father and get shitfaced when she wasn’t fucking the new guy. Ronnie knew how I felt and resented me for it.

  (Ronnie had at least one other child, Michael, presumably by second husband Wade Adams. Mickey, as he was called, was by this time in his early twenties and living out of state. I’d never met him, and Ronnie never mentioned him. A couple years later, I heard he was killed during a drug deal gone bad in St. Louis.)

  She also knew that I meant what I said—that I would kill Eugene if I went back to the longfellow house—and although she hated Eugene as much as I did, she was by that time beginning, in spite of the booze, to assume responsibility for the few of us LaVoies who were still alive. Anyway, after a month or two she got used to having me sleeping in the tiny spare bedroom off the farmhouse’s kitchen and adopted the strategy of getting me as liquored up as she was before she went back upstairs to spend the afternoon with Gervais. I suppose she believed I wouldn’t hear them or comprehend what they were doing or feel bad about Rossy’s kids if I were drunk enough, and I suppose she was right.

  For a while then everything was okay. If anyone out in the sticks of western Hiawatha County knew that the cop-killer Joe LaVoie was staying under the Grants’ leaky roof, they didn’t seem to care. Nobody I was ever aware of drove by to gawk or throw green apples or threaten to put a bullet between my cop-killer eyes. If they had, they probably would’ve been distracted by all the junk in the yard and the gorgeous blonde in the halter top and short shorts coming and going with a station wagon full of blond kids and a large black man who was definitely not the kids’ father. I myself got along fine with the kids and with Gervais, and I got over the discomfort or whatever the hell it was of having my sister take care of me the way I needed, and nobody ever brought up 1953 or prison or anything else they didn’t think I wanted to talk about.

  Still, there was the strain I didn’t recognize at first, but finally did after a few months of living in close quarters with people of the same blood and disposition.

  As long as I’d been gone and as much as Ronnie had been through while I was away, I was still as much a part of her life and vice versa as ever, which is to say we were still LaVoies. I would wake up nights thinking I was back on longfellow Avenue, not alone with Eugene like a few months earlier, but with Mother and the Old Man and Jack and Bernard and the girls and the twins. Eugene was in fact gone at that time, in prison himself, before the legitimate jobs, before Jesus, before he had the house to himself. I’d wake up hearing Mother praying or the Old Man throwing Mother’s things around their bedroom. I’d imagine Jack up in his room with his little television set and paperback books, Bernard appearing for the first time in a snap-brim fedora and gangster shirt and tie, Ronnie showing Janine how to wear her sweater backside front so the buttons opened down the spine. In those dreams, one thing would lead to another and pretty soon that fat fuck Follmer would be sniffing around after the girls and Jack and Bernard and I would have our guns in the car and the whole goddamned debacle would be h
appening again.

  Once I woke up after dreaming about my girlfriend Monika back in Nuremberg, but Shorty Gorman was in the same dream and the two of them together like that spoiled it, made me want to kill them both.

  It was the booze of course and being around Ronnie who tried but couldn’t help herself, not then anyway, not when she was drinking the way she was and who still, in her middle forties, had a young woman’s body and was still compelled to show it to every man she came across, even her damaged brother because damaged or not he was or had been a man—it was the booze and Ronnie and what she still couldn’t help at that time that made me have those dreams.

  It was also Rossy Grant coming back one afternoon, slinking in the back door like a thief in his own house while Ronnie and the kids were out shopping with Gervais, telling me he watched the house with binoculars from his car parked up the road, even confessing to jacking off while watching Ronnie in her halter top through the glasses. Crying, he said he had a gun in the car but couldn’t work up the nerve to kill the nigger for taking what belonged to him. Rossy was drinking even more than the rest of us, if that was possible.

  Roswell Grant was born big and blond and powerful. Back in the old neighborhood he was as well-heeled and handsome a kid as we knew or could imagine. His old man had gone to college, played first-string tackle at the University of Minnesota, and now sold hardware—shelving and soda-fountain fixtures, I believe it was—to drugstores and five-and-dimes. Big and strong as he was, Rossy was too fearful a kid to play serious football and too reckless and eager to please as a young adult to hold onto the money his father supposedly gave him.

  Everybody liked Rossy except his old man, who thought he was a pansy. The girls didn’t care about the football or the money. They cared about Rossy’s movie-star smile, broad shoulders, and gargantuan equipment, and they lined up to let him have his way with them. Ronnie was a month shy of fifteen the first time she had sex with Rossy. She’d had sex with him on a fairly regular basis ever since—through two marriages to other men, through their own stormy marriage, through three kids and a dozen affairs on both sides and everything else that had happened to them and their families. Now Rossy was afraid he’d never fuck her again.